Sunday House Church Gatherings

The principle of simple gatherings translates into how Sunday gatherings are facilitated.  We want to people to view that week’s Scripture as their sermon. In a traditional church, you get a sermon on Sunday, and then you get into small groups to discuss it.  For us, we want to devote ourselves to thinking deeply not about the leader’s words but the inspired word of God – that is how we devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching. We don’t want to draw people to how we explain Scripture.  Rather, we double down on the belief that if you have the Spirit of God in you, you are able to read Scripture yourself, and as a body we can wrestle with Scripture together.

Leaders don’t regularly preach a sermon on Sundays.  If the leader feels very strongly about a message that they want to bring to the church, they can teach for 5 to 10 minutes at points.  Leaders shouldn’t be the ones to speak for the majority of the time in our gatherings. If they do, it subconsciously teaches people that they don’t have as much to offer. There is a place and time for sermons, but if every single week there is only one person talking about the Bible, instead of the whole church talking about it, we can lose the culture of everyone reading the Bible for themselves.  The role of the leader is to ask really good questions to get their church thinking through Scripture as well as teach throughout the discussion.

We really want to get the body involved in being able to bring something to church gatherings. Make sure each person in your church understands this: If you’ve spent time with the Lord all week, meditating on the Word, you should have something to offer that would be beneficial to the body.

Sunday Corporate Family Gathering

FIRST SUNDAY OF EVERY MONTH

On the first Sunday of every month the church will meet corporately as a family to worship together. This service is held at 3:00 pm followed by a family bring & share meal. The service is held at Village Green Community Church. On a rotating basis, each house church is responsible for facilitating all aspects of the corporate meeting. These meetings are more traditional in nature which will typically include worship and a sermon.

Prayer Gatherings

The same principle applies in our times of corporate prayer.  We want to see people come into prayer gatherings desiring to see God use them to build up the body and bless.

We recommend trying to hold back from creating an agenda for prayer time, and have God direct the meeting through other people. In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul talks about someone having a hymn, another a tongue, and another having a prophecy, and all these should be done in order in gatherings.  Biblical gatherings have the element of different people participating and God speaking through different people.

In church we often feel like we need to control or dictate every minute of a gathering. As leaders, we need to create space for the Spirit to move, while not letting things get out of control or unhealthy.

Sometimes leading prayer meetings looks like just saying, “let’s pray” and sitting and waiting on the Lord.  Someone might bring up something, like a sin we need to confess. The role of the leader is to affirm or redirect that. The leader should guide and direct, but not control. The church is not waiting for the leader to discern what the Holy Spirit is saying or doing. Rather, everyone is discerning, looking to build up the body. Paul writes in Ephesians 4 that the body “grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (v.16, NIV).  Our growth is connected to everyone working to build each other up. Since that is true, we believe it is important to focus on creating that sort of culture in our gatherings.

Children

Church is not a Sunday morning thing, and therefore we shouldn’t think of training and ministry mostly in terms of Sunday morning programs.  Our children get to be in a community of believers who love each other deeply, live life together, support each other, and watch each other’s kids.  It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. We believe the best thing for the discipleship of our children are 1) parents who are discipled well 2)  the body of believers who will be the aunts and uncles in the Lord and will love them and model Christ to them in the normal rhythms of life.

Regarding how to incorporate children at your church in your gatherings, leaders have freedom to think through what would work best for your group.  A church with a group of kids under 5 will look a lot different from a church that has only 2 teenagers. A guiding principle is that we want to value children.  We don’t want to segment people out too much based on age. And we want the whole church to be interacting with each other. Where we can, we’d love to have kids engaged in gatherings. But more than anything, we want them to be engaged relationally.  This might mean that when you spend time with other people in the church, discipling them or just sharing life, you have the children around you as well, so that there can be more space for different age groups to live life together and to love one another.